I am an evil giraffe. Who no longer blogs about politics.

So last month there was SOME sort of benchmark established for the Nevada state exchange:

According to Nevada Health Link’s Twitter feed, as of October 15, 32,280 Nevadans had created accounts on the exchange, with 11,916 of them beginning applications. 3,795 had completed the eligibility process and 1,419 had selected a plan and placed it in their cart, a task at least one step short of enrolling in a plan.

The state exchange was projected to enroll 118,000 uninsured Nevadans during the open enrollment period, which runs from October 1, 2013 through March 31, 2014. In a report on the Exchange Enrollment Facilitator program, Nevada Health Link predicted that 80% of those enrolled through that particular program would enroll by December 15 and be covered on January 1.

Applying that same percentage to overall enrollment results in a target of 94,400 enrolling through Nevada Health Link from October 1 through December 15. The 1,419 Nevadans who had selected a plan in the first 20% of this period is just 1.5% of the enrollment target. And the number of people who had actually enrolled in a plan is certainly less.

Pass to the side for the moment the minor detail that almost 25K Nevadans have lost their insurance and less than a thousand have signed up. The state exchange has a bigger problem: it has a month to sign up 90K people. And by that I mean it has a month to get revenue from 90K people. This is supposed to be economic activity, after all. The idea is to have a sustainable marketplace (or, at least, the government ersatz equivalent of one). If nobody’s entering the state exchanges, either, well*…